Last week, I introduced you to my 2021 reading journal. This week, I’ll be sharing my first monthly spreads. I’m new to bullet journaling and I’m still figuring out the format that works best for me, so you may see some mistakes or things that ended up being changed in later months. Hopefully, as I continue to work on this journal, I’ll get better at designing these pages in a clean and beautiful way.

I wanted to bring some hope and excitement for the future into the new year this January, so I chose a space theme. On the left, I started with a title page for the month of January and a small calendar where I could mark the days when I read. On the right, I filled out the titles for the books that I read. I only finished one book in January because I was having a hard time finding books that I wanted to read. I kept starting new books, losing interest partway through, and abandoning them. Now, I don’t like to force myself to finish a book if I’m not enjoying it, but it was frustrating to not be able to finish more this month.

At least the theme is cute. The star and planet stickers are from Happy Planner but the real highlights are the cute Rilakkuma stickers from Daiso. I love their little astronaut suits! The washi is from Simply Gilded.

At the end of January’s pages, I added a monthly review. As you can see, I read 22 days but only finished one book. That’s because I didn’t count the books that I started and didn’t finish. The total pages read would probably be a lot more if I counted the partial reads, but I just didn’t track them.

The book I actually finished was Midnight Smoke by Helen Harper. This is the third book in her Firebrand series, and I read the first two books in December last year. Because I haven’t reviewed the first two books, I’ll start with the first one later this week. But if you’d like to see my thoughts on the third, you can peek at the spread below. (Warning: spoilers!)